Monthly Archives: February 2008

OK, so we know that the time of the dinosaurs must have been a pretty rough time to live. To say nothing of the carnivorous dinosaurs themselves, you had to deal with plenty of air and sea predators as well. As Gollum would say, “nassssty place, precioussss”.

Well, it seems like even the frogs were nasty buggers back then as well:

It was the biggest, baddest, meanest froggy ever to have hopped on Earth.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery in north-western Madagascar of a bulky amphibian dubbed the “devil frog” that lived 65 million to 70 million years ago and was so nasty it may have eaten newborn dinosaurs.

This brute was larger than any frog living today and may be the biggest frog ever to have existed, according to paleontologist David Krause of Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, New York, one of the scientists who found the remains.

Andrew has sent me an article detailing how popular anti-virus software deals with threats not present in standard AV signatures:

The winner of this antivirus sweepstakes was a product called Avira, which managed to detect and defeat 71 percent of the unknown malware. Right behind it was the equally-obscure NOD32, which swept away 68 percent of the threats. The more well-known commercial products fared more poorly. Norton Antivirus and McAfee tied at a mere 24 percent, while Microsoft’s OneCare did even worse by only identifying 18 percent of the new threats. Resting at the bottom of the barrel were Kaspersky and eScan at nine percent, and AVG, which detected only eight percent of malicious software in addition to producing many false positives.